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Thursday, May 17, 2012

Marquette Center for Peacemaking: Demonstrate at NATO Meeting

Marquette’s Center for Peacemaking has never pretended to be any sort of academic enterprise. Rather, it has simply been a center for left-wing activism.

The NATO Summit is just days away! Fifty heads of state will be meeting in Chicago to potentially pledge billions in funding to the ongoing war in Afghanistan as well as to make important decisions that will affect the peace and stability of our entire planet. In response to the NATO Summit, Peace Action-WI is organizing a bus from Milwaukee to the Counter Summit in Chicago.

The Marquette University Center for Peacemaking strives to empower the University and the wider community to explore together the necessary skills to become informed, spiritually-centered, nonviolent peacemakers. Rooted in the Ignatian charism, the Center works with a spirit of confidence and joy to achieve an awakening to the complementary relationship of scholarship, spirituality, non-violent living, and the active struggle for peace and justice.

Of course, there is plenty of room to debate the war in Afghanistan. But the Center for Peacemaking isn’t interested in debate. Their assumption is that any U.S. military action is evil and imperialistic, and that demonstrating against it is the obvious response.

The Center is, in other words, anti-intellectual. They don’t believe there are any intellectually challenging policy questions to be addressed, rather there is only the “struggle for peace and justice” with it always being obvious that peace and justice are on the left side of any issue.